A Lesson in Chasing the Wrong Things

I was about twenty-eight when I decided I was going to buy myself a brand-new car.

Not new to me.

Brand new.

Drive-it-off-the-forecourt, nobody-else-has-owned-it, still-smells-like-the-dealership new.

And that was a very big deal for me, because until then, my cars had always been bangers.

Proper bangers.

I’d always had second-hand cars, used cars, hand-me-down cars — the kind of cars that taught you things because sooner or later they were going to break down somewhere inconvenient and you were going to have to work out what was wrong with them.

Over the years, mostly through necessity, I’d become pretty competent around a car.

I could change a tyre without much drama. I knew my way around spark plugs. I understood far more about engines and the various noises a car shouldn’t be making than I probably ever intended to.

When you spend years owning cars that regularly require attention at the side of the road, you either learn a few things or spend an awful lot of time waiting for someone else to rescue you.

My first car had actually been a hand-me-down from my brother.

I paid him £50 for it.

It was a tiny red car that we called The Grand Rouge — the Big Red — despite the fact that there was absolutely nothing grand or particularly big about it.

It was so old it had a choke.

You had to pull the choke out to start the engine, wait for it to warm up and then gradually push it back in.

But I loved that little car.

It was a brilliant runaround, and I could fill the entire tank for about £20.

After the Grand Rouge came more bangers.

Cars that broke down.

Cars that needed fixing.

Cars where a new noise would start and you’d immediately think, Right. What’s that going to cost me?

So the idea that I was now in a position to walk into a dealership and order a car that nobody else had ever owned felt enormous.

This wasn’t just buying something shiny.

It felt like a treat to myself.

Maybe even a marker.

I’d worked hard. I had a decent job. I was working as a grant manager for a charity in Manchester and earning good money, and somewhere along the way I had decided that this was what grown-up success was supposed to look like.

A new car.

A monthly payment.

Something shiny sitting outside the house that quietly announced that I was doing alright.

I can’t remember exactly what the payment was now. £210 a month, perhaps. Maybe less. What I do remember is that it felt like a substantial amount of my wages.

But I could afford it.

And I wanted it.

Or at least, I thought I did.

I had recently moved back in with my parents after a relationship had fallen apart. I had been preparing to move in with someone and then, rather spectacularly, everything unravelled and we split up.

In hindsight, one of the best things that could have happened to me.

At the time, though, I felt as though I had somehow moved backwards.

I was nearly thirty, living with my mum and dad again, newly single and still driving one of my collection of questionable vehicles.

My boss used to tease me about it.

You’re earning decent money now, Fran.

You’re still living at home.

You’re driving around in that banger.

Your relationship status is all over the place.

There was an underlying suggestion that perhaps I should be doing adulthood slightly better.

And although I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t living with my parents because I had failed to launch, and that sometimes life simply collapses your plans and sends you temporarily back in the direction you came from, I think some of it got under my skin.

I felt stuck in a sort of no-man’s-land.

Not where I had expected to be.

Not where I thought other people expected me to be either.

And buying the car became part of correcting that.

Proof that I was moving forwards again.

Around the same time, my Auntie Mary was dying.

She had COPD and was approaching the end of her life. She was on a morphine driver by then, and watching what the illness did to her was horrible.

The morphine meant that she wasn’t always completely herself.

Sometimes she became frightened or confused. She would look at my Uncle Dave, the man she had shared her life with, and not know who he was.

There would be money missing.

A passport she needed to find.

A strange man in the house who she was convinced was trying to steal from her.

My Uncle Dave would be understandably devastated by it.

But for reasons I will never really understand, she always seemed to recognise me.

I’d walk in and hear:

“Oh, Franny. Franny, Franny, Franny.”

And then she would tell me what was happening.

There was a man in the house.

He was trying to take her money.

She couldn’t find her passport.

Something wasn’t right.

And I would sit with her and try to bring her back.

“It’s Uncle Dave, Auntie Mary. You know him. You’re alright. Nobody is stealing anything.”

And for a little while, sometimes, she would settle.

One day I went to see her carrying the brochure for my new car.

I was ridiculously excited.

And perhaps all those years of bangers were part of why I was so excited.

No more lying awake wondering whether the car would start in the morning.

No more listening suspiciously to a new rattle.

No more impromptu roadside mechanics.

I was getting a brand-new car.

I sat beside this woman who had loved me my whole life and showed her photographs of it.

The interior.

The colour.

The little features.

All the things the salesman had undoubtedly convinced me were terribly important.

I remember wanting to show her.

Wanting her to see that something good was happening to me.

Look what I’m getting.

Look at this.

Isn’t it brilliant?

Not long afterwards, Auntie Mary died.

And a week or two after that, my brand-new car arrived.

The thing I had been waiting for.

The thing I had signed paperwork for.

The thing I had imagined myself driving away in.

After years of £50 cars, hand-me-downs, breakdowns, spark plugs and standing at the side of the road trying to work out what had gone wrong this time, I finally had the car I had imagined would feel like an achievement.

And I felt almost nothing.

There was no great burst of excitement.

No sense of arrival.

No feeling that my life had suddenly become more successful because there was a new car sitting outside.

It was just a car.

Metal.

Seats.

An engine.

A monthly payment.

And I remember thinking how extraordinary it was that something I had wanted so badly could become meaningless almost overnight.

Because suddenly I understood the exchange rate between things and time.

There wasn’t one.

I could earn more money.

I could buy another car.

I could replace almost everything I owned.

But I couldn’t buy another afternoon with Auntie Mary.

I couldn’t walk through her door again and hear:

“Oh, Franny. Franny, Franny, Franny.”

I couldn’t sit beside her and reassure her that Uncle Dave wasn’t stealing her money.

I couldn’t show her another brochure.

I couldn’t have five more minutes.

And I would have handed that car back without hesitation for those five minutes.

It was probably one of the most useful lessons I learned in my twenties.

Not that owning things is wrong.

Not that buying something beautiful or expensive or completely unnecessary can’t bring enormous pleasure.

Things can be wonderful.

They can make our lives easier.

They can carry memories.

They can become heirlooms.

They can represent independence, achievement, freedom or years of hard work.

And sometimes they really are rewards.

That car was.

I’d worked hard enough to be able to walk into a dealership after years of driving cars held together with optimism and whatever I’d managed to repair myself, and say, I’d like that one.

There was something genuinely lovely about that.

But sometimes we ask things to do a job they were never capable of doing.

We ask them to prove that we’re successful.

We ask them to show other people that we’re doing alright.

We ask them to rescue us from feeling behind.

We ask them to make us feel as though our lives are moving in the right direction.

And they can’t.

I thought I was buying independence.

Perhaps I was really buying evidence.

Evidence for my boss.

Evidence for the world.

Maybe even evidence for myself.

Look.

I’m nearly thirty and I am doing fine.

But life had placed something else beside that shiny new car and made the comparison almost embarrassingly simple.

One was replaceable.

One wasn’t.

I have owned plenty of things since.

I’ve wanted things.

Saved for things.

Bought things I absolutely did not need.

And I probably always will.

But somewhere underneath all of it sits the memory of that car.

The thing I thought I desperately wanted until the moment I got it.

And Auntie Mary.

The person I would have traded it for in an instant.

Sometimes we spend years chasing the things we think will make a life look successful.

And then life, if we’re paying attention, quietly shows us what was valuable all along.